Libvirt is a C toolkit to interact with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes). It is free software available under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Virtualization of the Linux Operating System means the ability to run multiple instances of Operating Systems concurently on a single hardware system where the basic resources are driven by a Linux instance. The library aim at providing long term stable C API initially for the Xen paravirtualization but should be able to integrate other virtualization mechanisms, it currently also support QEmu and KVM.
Here is the list of official releases, however since it is early on in the development of libvirt, it is preferable when possible to just use the CVS version or snapshot, contact the mailing list and check the ChangeLog to gauge progresses.
Libvirt is a C toolkit to interact with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes), but libvirt won't try to provide all possible interfaces for interacting with the virtualization features.
To avoid ambiguity about the terms used here here are the definitions for some of the specific concepts used in libvirt documentation:
Now we can define the goal of libvirt: to provide the lowest possible generic and stable layer to manage domains on a node.
This implies the following:
So libvirt should be a building block for higher level management tools and for applications focusing on virtualization of a single node (the only exception being domain migration between node capabilities which may need to be added at the libvirt level). Where possible libvirt should be extendable to be able to provide the same API for remote nodes, however this is not the case at the moment, the code currently handle only local node accesses (extension for remote access support is being worked on, see the mailing list discussions about it).
Currently libvirt supports 2 kind of virtualization, and its internal structure is based on a driver model which simplifies adding new engines:
When running in a Xen environment, programs using libvirt have to execute in "Domain 0", which is the primary Linux OS loaded on the machine. That OS kernel provides most if not all of the actual drivers used by the set of domains. It also runs the Xen Store, a database of informations shared by the hypervisor, the kernels, the drivers and the xen daemon. Xend. The xen daemon supervise the control and execution of the sets of domains. The hypervisor, drivers, kernels and daemons communicate though a shared system bus implemented in the hypervisor. The figure below tries to provide a view of this environment:
The library can be initialized in 2 ways depending on the level of priviledge of the embedding program. If it runs with root access, virConnectOpen() can be used, it will use three different ways to connect to the Xen infrastructure:
The library will usually interact with the Xen daemon for any operation changing the state of the system, but for performance and accuracy reasons may talk directly to the hypervisor when gathering state informations at least when possible (i.e. when the running program using libvirt has root priviledge access).
If it runs without root access virConnectOpenReadOnly() should be used to connect to initialize the library. It will then fork a libvirt_proxy program running as root and providing read_only access to the API, this is then only useful for reporting and monitoring.
The model for QEmu and KVM is completely similar, basically KVM is based on QEmu for the process controlling a new domain, only small details differs between the two. In both case the libvirt API is provided by a controlling process forked by libvirt in the background and which launch and control the QEmu or KVM process. That program called libvirt_qemud talks though a specific protocol to the library, and connects to the console of the QEmu process in order to control and report on its status. Libvirt tries to expose all the emulations models of QEmu, the selection is done when creating the new domain, by specifying the architecture and machine type targetted.
The code controlling the QEmu process is available in the
qemud/ directory.
As the previous section explains, libvirt can communicate using different channels with the current hypervisor, and should also be able to use different kind of hypervisor. To simplify the internal design, code, ease maintainance and simplify the support of other virtualization engine the internals have been structured as one core component, the libvirt.c module acting as a front-end for the library API and a set of hypvisor drivers defining a common set of routines. That way the Xen Daemon accces, the Xen Store one, the Hypervisor hypercall are all isolated in separate C modules implementing at least a subset of the common operations defined by the drivers present in driver.h:
proxy/directory.Note that a given driver may only implement a subset of those functions, (for example saving a Xen domain state to disk and restoring it is only possible though the Xen Daemon), in that case the driver entry points for unsupported functions are initialized to NULL.
The latest versions of libvirt can be found on the libvirt.org server ( HTTP, FTP). You will find there the released versions as well as snapshot tarballs updated from CVS head every hour
Anonymous CVS is also available, first register onto the server:
cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@libvirt.org:2401/data/cvs login
it will request a password, enter anoncvs. Then you can checkout the development tree with:
cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@libvirt.org:2401/data/cvs co
libvirt
Use ./autogen.sh to configure the local checkout, then make
and make install, as usual. All normal cvs commands are now
available except commiting to the base.
This section describes the XML format used to represent domains, there are variations on the format based on the kind of domains run and the options used to launch them:
The formats try as much as possible to follow the same structure and reuse elements and attributes where it makes sense.
The library use an XML format to describe domains, as input to virDomainCreateLinux()
and as the output of virDomainGetXMLDesc(),
the following is an example of the format as returned by the shell command
virsh xmldump fc4 , where fc4 was one of the running domains:
<domain type='xen' id='18'> <name>fc4</name> <os> <type>linux</type> <kernel>/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-1.43_FC5guest</kernel> <initrd>/boot/initrd-2.6.15-1.43_FC5guest.img</initrd> <root>/dev/sda1</root> <cmdline> ro selinux=0 3</cmdline> </os> <memory>131072</memory> <vcpu>1</vcpu> <devices> <disk type='file'> <source file='/u/fc4.img'/> <target dev='sda1'/> </disk> <interface type='bridge'> <source bridge='xenbr0'/> <mac address='aa:00:00:00:00:11'/> <script path='/etc/xen/scripts/vif-bridge'/> </interface> <console tty='/dev/pts/5'/> </devices> </domain>
The root element must be called domain with no namespace, the
type attribute indicates the kind of hypervisor used, 'xen' is
the default value. The id attribute gives the domain id at
runtime (not however that this may change, for example if the domain is saved
to disk and restored). The domain has a few children whose order is not
significant:
disk, interface and
console descriptions in no special orderThe format of the devices and their type may grow over time, but the following should be sufficient for basic use:
A disk device indicates a block device, it can have two
values for the type attribute either 'file' or 'block' corresponding to the 2
options availble at the Xen layer. It has two mandatory children, and one
optional one in no specific order:
An interface element describes a network device mapped on the
guest, it also has a type whose value is currently 'bridge', it also have a
number of children in no specific order:
A console element describes a serial console connection to
the guest. It has no children, and a single attribute tty which
provides the path to the Pseudo TTY on which the guest console can be
accessed
Life cycle actions for the domain can also be expressed in the XML format, they drive what should be happening if the domain crashes, is rebooted or is poweroff. There is various actions possible when this happen:
The following could be used for a Xen production system:
<domain> ... <on_reboot>restart</on_reboot> <on_poweroff>destroy</on_poweroff> <on_crash>rename-restart</on_crash> ... </domain>
While the format may be extended in various ways as support for more hypervisor types and features are added, it is expected that this core subset will remain functional in spite of the evolution of the library.
Here is an example of a domain description used to start a fully virtualized (a.k.a. HVM) Xen domain. This requires hardware virtualization support at the processor level but allows to run unmodified operating systems:
<domain type='xen' id='3'>
<name>fv0</name>
<uuid>4dea22b31d52d8f32516782e98ab3fa0</uuid>
<os>
<type>hvm</type>
<loader>/usr/lib/xen/boot/hvmloader</loader>
<boot dev='hd'/>
</os>
<memory>524288</memory>
<vcpu>1</vcpu>
<on_poweroff>destroy</on_poweroff>
<on_reboot>restart</on_reboot>
<on_crash>restart</on_crash>
<features>
<pae/>
<acpi/>
<apic/>
</features>
<devices>
<emulator>/usr/lib/xen/bin/qemu-dm</emulator>
<interface type='bridge'>
<source bridge='xenbr0'/>
<mac address='00:16:3e:5d:c7:9e'/>
<script path='vif-bridge'/>
</interface>
<disk type='file'>
<source file='/root/fv0'/>
<target dev='hda'/>
</disk>
<disk type='file' device='cdrom'>
<source file='/root/fc5-x86_64-boot.iso'/>
<target dev='hdc'/>
<readonly/>
</disk>
<disk type='file' device='floppy'>
<source file='/root/fd.img'/>
<target dev='fda'/>
</disk>
<graphics type='vnc' port='5904'/>
</devices>
</domain>
There is a few things to notice specifically for HVM domains:
<features> block is used to enable
certain guest CPU / system features. For HVM guests the following
features are defined:
pae - enable PAE memory addressingapic - enable IO APICacpi - enable ACPI bios<os> block description is very different, first
it indicates that the type is 'hvm' for hardware virtualization, then
instead of a kernel, boot and command line arguments, it points to an os
boot loader which will extract the boot informations from the boot device
specified in a separate boot element. The dev attribute on
the boot tag can be one of:
fd - boot from first floppy devicehd - boot from first harddisk devicecdrom - boot from first cdrom device<devices> section includes an emulator entry
pointing to an additional program in charge of emulating the deviceshda-hdd, or a floppy device
fda, fdb. The <disk> element
also supports a 'device' attribute to indicate what kinda of hardware to
emulate. The following values are supported:
floppy - a floppy disk controllerdisk - a generic hard drive (the default it
omitted)cdrom - a CDROM devicehdc channel, while for 3.0.3 and later, it can be emulated
on any IDE channel.<devices> section also include at least one
entry for the graphic device used to render the os. Currently there is
just 2 types possible 'vnc' or 'sdl'. If the type is 'vnc', then an
additional port attribute will be present indicating the TCP
port on which the VNC server is accepting client connections.It is likely that the HVM description gets additional optional elements and attributes as the support for fully virtualized domain expands, especially for the variety of devices emulated and the graphic support options offered.
Support for the KVM virtualization is provided in recent Linux kernels (2.6.20 and onward). This requires specific hardware with acceleration support and the availability of the special version of the QEmu binary. Since this relies on QEmu for the machine emulation like fully virtualized guests the XML description is quite similar, here is a simple example:
<domain type='kvm'> <name>demo2</name> <uuid>4dea24b3-1d52-d8f3-2516-782e98a23fa0</uuid> <memory>131072</memory> <vcpu>1</vcpu> <os> <type>hvm</type> </os> <devices> <emulator>/home/user/usr/kvm-devel/bin/qemu-system-x86_64</emulator> <disk type='file' device='disk'> <source file='/home/user/fedora/diskboot.img'/> <target dev='hda'/> </disk> <interface type='user'> <mac address='24:42:53:21:52:45'/> </interface> <graphics type='vnc' port='-1'/> </devices> </domain>
The specific points to note if using KVM are:
except those points the options should be quite similar to Xen HVM ones.
The networking support in the QEmu and KVM case is more flexible, and support a variety of options:
Provides a virtual LAN with NAT to the outside world. The virtual
network has DHCP & DNS services and will give the guest VM addresses
starting from 10.0.2.15. The default router will be
10.0.2.2 and the DNS server will be 10.0.2.3.
This networking is the only option for unprivileged users who need their
VMs to have outgoing access. Example configs are:
<interface type='user'/>
<interface type='user'>
<mac address="11:22:33:44:55:66:/>
</interface>
Provides a virtual network using a bridge device in the host.
Depending on the virtual network configuration, the network may be
totally isolated,NAT'ing to aan explicit network device, or NAT'ing to
the default route. DHCP and DNS are provided on the virtual network in
all cases and the IP range can be determined by examining the virtual
network config with 'virsh net-dumpxml <network
name>'. There is one virtual network called'default' setup out
of the box which does NAT'ing to the default route and has an IP range of
192.168.22.0/255.255.255.0. Each guest will have an
associated tun device created with a name of vnetN, which can also be
overriden with the <target> element. Example configs are:
<interface type='network'>
<source network='default'/>
</interface>
<interface type='network'>
<source network='default'/>
<target dev='vnet7'/>
<mac address="11:22:33:44:55:66:/>
</interface>
Provides a bridge from the VM directly onto the LAN. This assumes there is a bridge device on the host which has one or more of the hosts physical NICs enslaved. The guest VM will have an associated tun device created with a name of vnetN, which can also be overriden with the <target> element. The tun device will be enslaved to the bridge. The IP range / network configuration is whatever is used on the LAN. This provides the guest VM full incoming & outgoing net access just like a physical machine. Examples include:
<interface type='bridge'>
<source dev='br0'/>
</interface>
<interface type='bridge'>
<source dev='br0'/>
<target dev='vnet7'/>
<mac address="11:22:33:44:55:66:/>
</interface> <interface type='bridge'>
<source dev='br0'/>
<target dev='vnet7'/>
<mac address="11:22:33:44:55:66:/>
</interface>
Provides a means for the administrator to execute an arbitrary script to connect the guest's network to the LAN. The guest will have a tun device created with a name of vnetN, which can also be overriden with the <target> element. After creating the tun device a shell script will be run which is expected to do whatever host network integration is required. By default this script is called /etc/qemu-ifup but can be overriden.
<interface type='ethernet'/> <interface type='ethernet'> <target dev='vnet7'/> <script path='/etc/qemu-ifup-mynet'/> </interface>
A multicast group is setup to represent a virtual network. Any VMs whose network devices are in the same multicast group can talk to each other even across hosts. This mode is also available to unprivileged users. There is no default DNS or DHCP support and no outgoing network access. To provide outgoing network access, one of the VMs should have a 2nd NIC which is connected to one of the first 4 network types and do the appropriate routing. The multicast protocol is compatible with that used by user mode linux guests too. The source address used must be from the multicast address block.
<interface type='mcast'> <source address='230.0.0.1' port='5558'/> </interface>
A TCP client/server architecture provides a virtual network. One VM provides the server end of the netowrk, all other VMS are configured as clients. All network traffic is routed between the VMs via the server. This mode is also available to unprivileged users. There is no default DNS or DHCP support and no outgoing network access. To provide outgoing network access, one of the VMs should have a 2nd NIC which is connected to one of the first 4 network types and do the appropriate routing.
Example server config:
<interface type='server'> <source address='192.168.0.1' port='5558'/> </interface>
Example client config:
<interface type='client'> <source address='192.168.0.1' port='5558'/> </interface>
To be noted, options 2, 3, 4 are also supported by Xen VMs, so it is possible to use these configs to have networking with both Xen & QEMU/KVMs connected to each other.
Libvirt support for KVM and QEmu is the same code base with only minor changes. The configuration is as a result nearly identical, the only changes are related to QEmu ability to emulate various CPU type and hardware platforms, and kqemu support (QEmu own kernel accelerator when the emulated CPU is i686 as well as the target machine):
<domain type='qemu'> <name>QEmu-fedora-i686</name> <uuid>c7a5fdbd-cdaf-9455-926a-d65c16db1809</uuid> <memory>219200</memory> <currentMemory>219200</currentMemory> <vcpu>2</vcpu> <os> <type arch='i686' machine='pc'>hvm</type> <boot dev='cdrom'/> </os> <devices> <emulator>/usr/bin/qemu</emulator> <disk type='file' device='cdrom'> <source file='/home/user/boot.iso'/> <target dev='hdc'/> <readonly/> </disk> <disk type='file' device='disk'> <source file='/home/user/fedora.img'/> <target dev='hda'/> </disk> <interface type='network'> <source name='default'/> </interface> <graphics type='vnc' port='-1'/> </devices> </domain>
The difference here are:
As new virtualization engine support gets added to libvirt, and to handle cases like QEmu supporting a variety of emulations, a query interface has been added in 0.2.1 allowing to list the set of supported virtualization capabilities on the host:
char * virConnectGetCapabilities (virConnectPtr conn);
The value returned is an XML document listing the virtualization
capabilities of the host and virtualization engine to which
@conn is connected. One can test it using virsh
command line tool command 'capabilities', it dumps the XML
associated to the current connection. For example in the case of a 64 bits
machine with hardware virtualization capabilities enabled in the chip and
BIOS you will see
<capabilities> <host> <cpu> <arch>x86_64</arch> <features> <vmx/> </features> </cpu> </host> <!-- xen-3.0-x86_64 --> <guest> <os_type>xen</os_type> <arch name="x86_64"> <wordsize>64</wordsize> <domain type="xen"></domain> <emulator>/usr/lib64/xen/bin/qemu-dm</emulator> </arch> <features> </features> </guest> <!-- hvm-3.0-x86_32 --> <guest> <os_type>hvm</os_type> <arch name="i686"> <wordsize>32</wordsize> <domain type="xen"></domain> <emulator>/usr/lib/xen/bin/qemu-dm</emulator> <machine>pc</machine> <machine>isapc</machine> <loader>/usr/lib/xen/boot/hvmloader</loader> </arch> <features> </features> </guest> ... </capabilities>
The fist block (in red) indicates the host hardware capbilities, currently it is limited to the CPU properties but other information may be available, it shows the CPU architecture, and the features of the chip (the feature block is similar to what you will find in a Xen fully virtualized domain description).
The second block (in blue) indicates the paravirtualization support of the Xen support, you will see the os_type of xen to indicate a paravirtual kernel, then architecture informations and potential features.
The third block (in green) gives similar informations but when running a 32 bit OS fully virtualized with Xen using the hvm support.
This section is likely to be updated and augmented in the future, see the discussion which led to the capabilities format in the mailing-list archives.
Libvirt comes with direct support for the Python language (just make sure you installed the libvirt-python package if not compiling from sources). Also note that Daniel Berrange provides bindings for Perl too.
The Python binding should be complete and are mostly automatically
generated from the formal description of the API in xml. The bindings are
articulated around 2 classes virConnect and virDomain mapping to
the C types. Functions in the C API taking either type as argument then
becomes methods for the classes, their name is just stripped from the
virConnect or virDomain(Get) prefix and the first letter gets converted to
lower case, for example the C functions:
int virConnectNumOfDomains
(virConnectPtr conn);
int virDomainSetMaxMemory
(virDomainPtr domain, unsigned long memory);
become
virConn::numOfDomains(self)
virDomain::setMaxMemory(self, memory)
This process is fully automated, you can get a summary of the conversion in the file libvirtclass.txt present in the python dir or in the docs.There is a couple of function who don't map directly to their C counterparts due to specificities in their argument conversions:
virConnectListDomains
is replaced by virDomain::listDomainsID(self) which returns
a list of the integer ID for the currently running domainsvirDomainGetInfo
is replaced by virDomain::info() which returns a list of
So let's look at a simple example inspired from the basic.py
test found in python/tests/ in the source tree:
import libvirt import sys conn = libvirt.openReadOnly(None) if conn == None: print 'Failed to open connection to the hypervisor' sys.exit(1) try: dom0 = conn.lookupByName("Domain-0") except: print 'Failed to find the main domain' sys.exit(1) print "Domain 0: id %d running %s" % (dom0.ID(), dom0.OSType()) print dom0.info()
There is not much to comment about it, it really is a straight mapping from the C API, the only points to notice are:
libvirtThe main goals of libvirt when it comes to error handling are:
As result the library provide both synchronous, callback based and asynchronous error reporting. When an error happens in the library code the error is logged, allowing to retrieve it later and if the user registered an error callback it will be called synchronously. Once the call to libvirt ends the error can be detected by the return value and the full information for the last logged error can be retrieved.
To avoid as much as prossible troubles with a global variable in a multithreaded environment, libvirt will associate when possible the errors to the current connection they are related to, that way the error is stored in a dynamic structure which can be made thread specific. Error callback can be set specifically to a connection with
So error handling in the code is the following:
In all cases the error informations are provided as a virErrorPtr pointer to read-only structure virError containing the following fields:
and then extra raw informations about the error which may be initialized to 0 or NULL if unused
So usually, setting up specific error handling with libvirt consist of registering an handler with with virSetErrorFunc or with virConnSetErrorFunc, chech the value of the code value, take appropriate action, if needed let libvirt print the error on stderr by calling virDefaultErrorFunc. For asynchronous error handing, set such a function doing nothing to avoid the error being reported on stderr, and call virConnGetLastError or virGetLastError when an API call returned an error value. It can be a good idea to use virResetError or virConnResetLastError once an error has been processed fully.
At the python level, there only a global reporting callback function at this point, see the error.py example about it:
def handler(ctxt, err):
global errno
#print "handler(%s, %s)" % (ctxt, err)
errno = err
libvirt.registerErrorHandler(handler, 'context')
the second argument to the registerErrorHandler function is passed as the fist argument of the callback like in the C version. The error is a tuple containing the same field as a virError in C, but cast to Python.
Table of Contents:
libvirt is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, see the file COPYING.LIB in the distribution for the precise wording. The only library that libvirt depends upon is the Xen store access library which is also licenced under the LGPL.
Yes. The LGPL allows you to embed libvirt into a proprietary application. It would be graceful to send-back bug fixes and improvements as patches for possible incorporation in the main development tree. It will decrease your maintainance costs anyway if you do so.
The original distribution comes from ftp://libvirt.org/libvirt/.
The most generic solution is to re-fetch the latest src.rpm , and rebuild it locally with
rpm --rebuild libvirt-xxx.src.rpm.
If everything goes well it will generate two binary rpm packages (one providing the shared libs and virsh, and the other one, the -devel package, providing includes, static libraries and scripts needed to build applications with libvirt that you can install locally.
One can also rebuild the RPMs from a tarball:
rpmbuild -ta libdir-xxx.tar.gz
Or from a configured tree with:
make rpm
Large parts of the API may only be accessible with root priviledges, however the read only access to the xenstore data doesnot have to be forbidden to user, at least for monitoring purposes. If "virsh dominfo" fails to run as an user, change the mode of the xenstore read-only socket with:
chmod 666 /var/run/xenstored/socket_ro
and also make sure that the Xen Daemon is running correctly with local
HTTP server enabled, this is defined in
/etc/xen/xend-config.sxp which need the following line to be
enabled:
(xend-http-server yes)
If needed restart the xend daemon after making the change with the following command run as root:
service xend restart
As most UNIX libraries libvirt follows the "standard":
gunzip -c libvirt-xxx.tar.gz | tar xvf -
cd libvirt-xxxx
./configure --help
to see the options, then the compilation/installation proper
./configure [possible options]
make
make install
At that point you may have to rerun ldconfig or a similar utility to update your list of installed shared libs.
Libvirt requires libxenstore, which is usually provided by the xen packages as well as the public headers to compile against libxenstore.
The configure script (and other Makefiles) are generated. Use the autogen.sh script to regenerate the configure script and Makefiles, like:
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --disable-shared
To simplify the process of reusing the library, libvirt comes with pkgconfig support, which can be used directly from autoconf support or via the pkg-config command line tool, like:
pkg-config libvirt --libs
There is a mailing-list libvir-list@redhat.com for libvirt, with an on-line archive. Please subscribe to this list before posting by visiting the associated Web page and follow the instructions. Patches with explanations and provided as attachments are really appreciated and will be discussed on the mailing list. If possible generate the patches by using cvs diff -u in a CVS checkout.
We use Red Hat Bugzilla to track bugs to libvirt. If you want to report a bug, please check the existing open bugs, then if yours isn't a duplicate of an existing bug, log a new bug. It may be good to post to the mailing-list too if the issue looks serious, thanks !